Salutes

A Time reporter has one less hand after trying to toss a live grenade out of a humvee in Iraq. The photographer with him took on some shrapnel. Background on the reporter, Michael Weisskopf, who was on his second trip to Iraq: Veteran Post reporter David Maraniss, a longtime friend of Weisskopf, called him...

Ben Bagdikian on covering the civil rights movement in the early 1960s: I spent a lot of time in Holmes County, Mississippi, and the county seat, Lexington, including the period when I traveled with SNCC and stayed in their safe houses. At that time, the Mississippi Highway Patrol was, for all practical purposes, part...

Michael Francis Comerford was the legendary night city editor at the Philly Inquirer, who died Tuesday at 70. “It was amazing how much the Commodore could accomplish in an emergency with a skeleton crew.” Read the Inky’s story.

… was George Plimpton? Mr. Plimpton was at Camp David playing tennis with an unnamed president when a courtside phone rang and was answered by a steely Secret Service agent prepared for the next international crisis. “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” said the Secret Service man. “It’s for George.”

Nat Henthoff says the Sacramento Bee deserves a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Patriot Act. Among the specific illuminations of how government databases are being filled with the names of Americans unaware they have landed in converging surveillance systems, the first story reported that the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, which calls itself...

Iraq’s no place to go around writing stories people don’t like. Sometimes they put a bullet in you. Shawkat ignored letters warning him to close the paper after he published articles criticizing radical Islamists. On Tuesday morning, he paid the ultimate price for his principles. Two men followed him to the roof of his...

82. I didn’t have a Japanese Japanese teacher until college. (This is one of those 100-things-about-me lists that are flaming death in the hands of an inept writer. Since Autumn isn’t, it’s fun stuff.)